ELL News Headlines

Baltimore's Stoop Stories is a 12-year-old live show and podcast wherein people from all walks of life tell their tales. The premise is simple: Everyone has a story. But then few have one as horrific, heartbreaking — and ultimately inspiring — as the one told by Jacob Atem, who was born in the part of Sudan that is now the independent country of South Sudan and who is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Center for Humanitarian Health. Atem is a former Lost Boy, one of some 40,000 children orphaned by the Sudanese civil war in the 1990s. They fled the country on foot via arduous cross-country treks and spent years in refugee camps. Nearly 4,000 were ultimately resettled in the U.S.

For as long as he can remember, Angel Benavides has missed the beginning of the school year in Texas because his family stays in North Dakota through the harvest. It's weather-dependent, so there's no hard end; all Angel knows is they'll head home to Texas sometime in October or November. That flexibility is a big deal for employers who rely on seasonal workers to quickly harvest and process crops before they spoil. But it puts workers' kids — more than 300,000 of them nationwide, according to the Department of Education — in a tough situation: keeping their grades up in a system designed for students who start and finish the year at the same school.

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks to Brigitte Alepin, the creator of "Radio Dodo," or Sleepytime Radio, a program that creates bedtime stories for Syrian refugees.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor spoke Friday about a book she’s working on about kids with "life challenges," such as attention deficit disorder, autism, blindness and diabetes. Sotomayor, who was diagnosed with diabetes as a child, she said she wanted to write a book about "all of the common challenges, some visible and not so visible, that kids grow up in the world experiencing."

In a lyrical ode to the bonds of family and community, the Newbery Medal–winning author and best-selling illustrator are on top of their game in the match made in heaven. Love is a stellar picture book (Putnam, 2018) that begs to be shared with everyone you care about.

It was a meeting of the five families, but this one — with some assistance from the Seattle Public Library (SPL) — led to what may be the country's first crowdsourced book in the Somali language. When Seattle's Somali population sought more materials to help parents and children communicate in their native language and share their culture and customs, the library set out to develop a pilot project that would allow for family learning and promote cultural understanding — then possibly be scaled for wider use.

Can play help refugee children heal from trauma? That's the belief behind a new partnership formed by the Lego Foundation, Sesame Workshop and organizations working with Syrian and Rohingya refugees. In its first major humanitarian project, announced on Wednesday, the foundation will provide $100 million over five years to the makers of "Sesame Street" to deepen their work with the International Rescue Committee in the countries around Syria, and also to partner with the Bangladeshi relief organization BRAC.

Vanessa Goodthunder plans to open an immersion school this June in Minnesota, where only five Dakota first-language speakers remain. Funding and staffing challenges often face such schools, but Ms. Goodthunder is determined to 'help heal historical trauma.'

Sylvia Acevedo grew up on a dirt road in New Mexico. Her family was poor, living "paycheck to paycheck." After a meningitis outbreak in her Las Cruces neighborhood nearly killed her younger sister, her mother moved the family to a different neighborhood. At her new school, young Acevedo knew no one. Until a classmate convinced her to become a Brownie Girl Scout. And from that moment, she says, her life took on a new path.

Kerri Withrow Valentine's science classroom at Central Fall High School seems pretty typical. Yet most of the 14 members of this beginning language-level learner class are Spanish-speakers from Central and Northern South America; three are from Cabo Verde and speak Portuguese. It's in part because of her work with English as a second language (ESL) students that she has been designated "Teacher of the Year for Excellence in Environmental Education" by the Rhode Island Environmental Education Association (RIEEA).